From the April 2006 issue of New Urban News

A comprehensive approach to green building

Robert Steuteville

 Photographs Courtesy of Continuum Partners
Green building and the New Urbanism fit hand in glove at Belmar, the redevelopment of a former regional shopping mall in Lakewood, Colorado. Green building, like New Urbanism, requires creativity, flexibility, and thinking outside the box. At Belmar, it’s an open question as to which makes a greater contribution to saving resources — the green building and environmental technologies or the urban design. Tom Gougeon, principal and chief development officer at Continuum of Denver, Colorado, leans to the urban design, because of its far-reaching implications for Lakewood.
“Belmar brought together a lot of uses that might otherwise have dispersed around the landscape,” Gougeon says. “It will make Lakewood more viable in the long run economically, as
The following is a report on Belmar’s environmental record and what it took to carry out various aspects of the development’s accomplishments in this area. Building an environmentally sound development requires being smart about every resource, from the use of recycling, to construction materials, to HVAC systems, to alternative energy, Gougeon says. While the developer strives to make the project’s performance as green and pedestrian-friendly as possible, every aspect must make sense financially. The project is yielding solid returns, Continuum CEO Mark Falcone reported at the recent New Partners for Smart Growth conference in Denver. Early blocks yielded around 7 percent return on cost, and more recent blocks 12.5 to 13 percent return on cost, “an enormously lucrative deal for today’s market,” he says.
The success of the residential portion exceeded expectations. The townhouses built by McStain Neighborhoods started at $240,000 to $320,000, and the average price is now nearly $380,000. “That’s a testament to the fact that people really wanted to be in this environment,” says Roger Pecsok of Continuum.

Taking the LEED

Belmar already has one LEED silver-rated building and another is going through the certification process. Continuum spent $2,500 for each LEED registration fee plus about $4,000 for documentation and other costs related to the silver
Two technologies incorporated into the building made the biggest difference and accounted for the largest cost. The first was raising floors to allow the HVAC system to run under them rather than over the ceilings. That change places the heat under the building inhabitants, rather than 14 feet overhead, Gougeon says. He adds that the new system also gives workers greater control over temperature in individual work areas, saving energy and improving comfort. The second big technology was evaporative cooling instead of typical air conditioning refrigerants; evaporative cooling takes advantage of Colorado’s dry climate to save energy.
Continuum also incorporated other environmentally friendly features in the silver-rated building, including locally made brick, recycled steel, bicycle racks, and showers. In addition to saving energy, the green features and the rating make

Recycling of a grayfield site

Belmar represents recycling on three levels: the site itself is reused; one of the department stores was retrofitted as a mixed-use building; and about 90 percent of the construction materials, by weight and volume, from the old mall were processed and recycled, mostly on site. The reuse of the grayfield site is the most significant move here, because it makes use of existing public infrastructure and services, including bus lines.
Continuum would have liked to reuse more buildings, Gougeon says, but most of them stood in the path of the street grid the company wanted to create — a grid with connections to streets beyond the property. The one preexisting anchor building situated on a mid-block site was a three-story, 140,000 sq. ft. box with no windows except at one outside entrance. Continuum redesigned and improved entrances on the first floor and added windows on all four sides of the third floor, which was rebuilt as office space.
To bring more light into the first two floors, an atrium was built. This proved
Continuum saved a lot of money recycling asphalt, concrete, and other masonry, steel, and copper from the old mall and its parking lot. The firm set up a processing plant on site that recycled 200,000 tons of concrete and 2 million sq. ft. of asphalt. “If we had to landfill all of that, it would have been pretty expensive,” says Gougeon.

Alternative energy

The most visible example of alternative energy in Belmar is a wind farm on a parking lot, an idea that began as an art project. Continuum had signed on some tenants that were used to conventional suburban formats, Gougeon says, such as Pier One, Party America, Linens & Things, and DSW. They needed to be close to the large arterial road with surface parking. Continuum did what it could to urbanize these tenants, such as maintain a grid of streets and urban blocks. Yet a 400-space parking lot remained. “We started out thinking that we needed something in the parking lot that is fun and could tie it into the rest of
The wind farm is small potatoes compared to at least 10 acres of photovoltaics planned for the rooftops of Belmar buildings; they will be installed in the next five to seven years (see sidebar on energy financing above).

Mass transit

Belmar is located on major arterial roads, Wadsworth Boulevard and Alameda Avenue, that were already served by regional bus routes. In the past, buses dropped passengers off at the edge of the site, “and you had to walk across a huge parking lot,” Gougeon says. People who had no other choice used the service. With the street grid, buses now go right through Belmar to pick up and drop off. “That one change made the existing service 10 times better,” Gougeon says.

Shared parking

The shared parking made possible

Urban form

Because of the project’s mixed-use nature, 13 percent of the people who live in rental units at Belmar also work there, says Pecsok, making commuting more efficient. He believes the live-work percentage of the owner housing is similar. Placing the residences and workplaces close to retail and recreation has also reduced automobile trips. Integer employers can often be seen at Belmar coffee shops, restaurants, and drinking establishments, Gougeon says. “In so many ways this is reinforcing an urban notion of life,” he says

This article is available in the April/May 2006 issue of New Urban News, along with images and many more articles not available online. Subscribe or order the individual issue.